Getting JAVA to work in Firefox 3.66: The REAL Scoop

Recently, my Ubuntu LINUX box - a 2.4GHz P4 - suffered a catastrophic hardware failure. I will have to replace the motherboard, CPU, and memory. I have a dual-boot system with Windows VISTA and Fedora LINUX which I set up for experiments and for work on my graduate school classes. The Fedora box lacked some of the software I needed for email reading, listening to MP3s, ... that I did on the Ubuntu box. So under duress I scrambled to set it up to handle the slack.

After an evening-long battle, I have finally gotten most of the software installed that I need for important everyday business. Other than updating Firefox to the latest version (3.6.6 as of this writing), one of the most basic requirements is JAVA, since so many web sites use it extensively.

In order to get JAVA running in the Firefox browser in a LINUX environment, you need to add a symbolic link (symlink in IT speak) in your /usr/mozilla/plugins directory. In the past, the file one wanted to link to was libjavaplugin_oji.so. That all has changed, but most sites on the Internet have NOT caught up with the times! The file you NOW want to make your symlink to is libnpjp2.so.

Use the format of the instructions you read everywhere else, but you can generally use this default path to link the proper file:
/usr/java/jre1.6.0_20/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so
If your JAVA runtime engine is installed in another directory, or is a different version, modify the path accordingly.

Here's what to do:
Using the command line, navigate to your /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins directory (usual default path), su to root, and type the command seen below.
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_20/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so

As stated earlier, if your JAVA is installed in a location different than /usr/java, or if you are using a different release of JAVA, modify this command accordingly.

Then do a "ls" command and make sure the libnpjp2.so symlink appears.

Once this is done, you need to test your installation to make sure it works. Go to Sun's Java Test Page. Click on the link to verify your JAVA version. If all is working correctly you should get a message confirming what version of the JAVA runtime engine you are running.

MANY, many thanks to Albert Hayr for this information! You can reach his site here.

In a future post I'll cover which repositories actually DO have the plugins for MP3 playing. I'm finding that there's considerable wrong information on this as well.

See my update to this article here: ORACLE Java Issues.